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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world.
That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and
voted up or down.

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Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted
to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning,
there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

Sprunge.us is a code/text sharing site like pastebin, but it is easy to post stuff from the command line.

How it works:

:w !command

In vim, w writes the current tab to a file when a filename is given afterwards, but if !command is given, the output is piped to the stdin of command.

curl -F "sprunge=<-" http://sprunge.us

curl is an HTTP client. The -F option does an HTTP post to the given address. The data in the quotes is passed in the post. The "sprunge=" part sets up a fieldname - the part that follows is what is associated with the name. The "<" tells curl to send data from the file descriptor that follows it. The "-" in bash is a file descriptor that points to stdin instead of an actual file; in this case, stdin is being piped in from vim. After we send the HTTP post to sprunge.us, it will give back a url that points to the data you just sent.

| xclip

xclip is a utility that lets you put stuff in your clipboard or selection buffer. This part uses a bash pipe ( | ) to redirect the stdout of the previous command to the stdin of the next command. So, we're capturing the URL that curl gave us and putting it into the selection buffer, ready to paste into IRC or a forum.

Notes:

Of course, for this to work, you must have curl (which comes by default on most distroes), and xclip installed.

Open up vi or vim at the first instance of a pattern in [file]. Useful if you know where you want to be, like "PermitRootLogin" in sshd_config. Also, vi +10 [file] will open up a file at line 10. VERY useful when you get "error at line 10" type of output.

If you have access to lsof, it'll give you more compressed output and show you the associated terminals (e.g., pts/5, which you could then use 'w' to figure out where it's originating from): lsof | grep '\.sw.$'

If you have swp files turned off, you can do something like: ps x | grep '[g,v]im', but it won't tell you about files open in buffers, via :e [file].

This command searches the current directory, and all of its subdirs, for files that have the string "foo" in their filename (foo.c, two-foo.txt, index-FOO-bar.php, etc), and opens them in Vim. It ignores any hidden .svn directories. Change -iname to -name if you want to do case-sensitive matches.

Files open in buffers by default, so to verify that the correct files were opened, type ":list". You can load all the files in tabs by doing ":tab ball" or use 'vim -p' on the command-line to load files straight to tabs.

This makes an alias for a command named 'busy'. The 'busy' command opens a random file in /usr/include to a random line with vim. Drop this in your .bash_aliases and make sure that file is initialized in your .bashrc.